Rupay is an employment lawyer in Germany, fighting for workers’ rights. Frustrated, working in a system rigged against workers, he sought out more empowering alternatives and discovered worker cooperatives. After years of researching and advising them as a lawyer, he went on to write A Practical Guide to Democratising Companies and to co-found a cooperative for cleaners.
In this episode of Punchcard, Rupay shares his experience incubating the cleaning cooperative and the importance that trust and social connections played within that.
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Can You Found a Co-op for Someone Else?
Rupay observed that co-ops were made up of mostly white, academic and managerial types, so he set out to create a more diverse co-operative, centering cleaners and migrant workers.
This approach raised alarm bells for Rupay and people around him, such approaches inherently introduce power dynamics that can suppress alternative ways of working, and create dependency rather than empowerment. Yet, according to Rupay, they were able to navigate these threats and create a co-op led by cleaners and migrants.
🎧 Listen to the whole episode to find out how
It’s Personal
It’s easy to overlook just how important interpersonal relations and trust are in cooperatives. Rupay initially focused on implementing the policies and structures he had studied, but quickly realised that the relationships between members were far more fundamental.
At first, the co-op was medicated through Rupay, since nobody else knew each other. Cleaning is notoriously an atomising job, as many shifts are worked along, so they paired members together on cleaning shifts and introduced weekly meeting to build relationships. As trust grew it allowed roles and responsibilities to be shared across the group, to the stage where Rupay was able to step away, leaving the co-ops to flourish alone.
🗣️ In next month’s episode I speak to mediator Paul Kahawatte about how to navigate conflict
Is This Why Most Co-ops Stay Small?
Rupay set out to create a cooperative capable of scaling and having a broader impact than many other co-ops. What he discovered however, is that it’s difficult to scale the human connections that sustain the democratic and participatory culture. This is a issue that keeps coming up and was echoed by previous guests, Corrina and Abbas.
In my search of solutions, I interviewed Aiofe Smith from the Great Care Co-op at workers.coop’s Autumn Assembly. They are experimenting with the Buurtzorg model from Holland to build a 1,000+ worker co-op in Ireland, an ambitious attempt to scale without losing the cooperative ethos.
Aiofe’s episode will be published in summer this year.
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